The piece that aired recently on WSYX-Columbus, Ohio, struck an ominous tone. It featured images of a shadowy basement workshop, cluttered with cooking pans and trays of artificial teeth.

The reporter, Tom Sussi, explained the place was a dental lab. The small operation certainly did not fit the spic-and-span image that might first come to mind when one hears the word “laboratory.” But under Ohio law, it was a perfectly legal place to manufacture dentures, Sussi learned as he did his interviews.

While Ohio beauticians, manicurists and masseuses are all “required to be licensed and properly trained,” the story concluded, the people who “who make things that go into your mouth, like crowns and dentures, are not.”

The situation is similar in a number of other states, as Kiera Butler of Mother Jones pointed out, in her own take on the issue, inspired by Sussi’s story. Continue reading →

Mary Otto, a Washington, D.C.-based freelancer, is the author of "Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America."